RELATED: Oh Jesus! Christmas Is Not Sexist

Cavuto’s first tip was a good one: “Don’t Think Too Much.” See, although I possess ovaries and a whole mess of fallopian tubes and, as such, am a natural-born nurturer and gift-giver, I usually end up giving most people on my list a gently-used candle, a $2.73 gift card to the Olive Garden of their choice, or a few loose Life Savers that had been rattling in my purse since last Fourth of July. Don’t overthink it! It’s the thought that counts!

Tip #2: “Avoid All Sales.” I think I found those Life Savers on the F train, but am not sure if that counts as a “sale,” really. That said, all men should avoid sales because, according to Cavuto, we women will know of your cheapskate ways and will sprinkle special voodoo dust on your penis as you sleep. When you awake, your member will vaguely resemble current-day Mickey Rourke and have developed the ability to hum the theme from Titanic. It will be awful for you, gentlemen. Just awful.

Tip #3: “Never Get Off The Cashier Line.” Sound advice, although I would expand it to read “Never Get Off While I’m The Cashier Line.” Men, amiright?

Tip #4: “Think Kiosks.” Because who doesn’t like getting pieces of shit for Christmas?

Tip #5: “Embraced Processed Meats and Cheeses.” Better yet, personalize your gift by drawing a happy face or scribbling a sweet message on a Kraft Single before stapling it to your beloved’s Christmas stocking. Spell “Olive You” on her pillow with pieces of olive loaf. Your wife — Or your husband. Who am I to assume? — will appreciate both your thoughtfulness and your creativity.

Tip #6: “Never Guess on Sizes.” Ack! Good tip! This is because, until we’re successful in getting back down to our birth weight, we ladies are constantly afraid that we’re too fat.

Tip #7: “Never Buy Gift Certificates.” Ladies prefer coupons. Or babies.

Tip #8: “Never Ask for Advice at the Mall.” Women will try to trick you into buying a gift that’s more luxurious, thoughtful, or beautiful than you’re willing to give. It’s something we all decided on during our last coven meeting, the one where we also all decided that Ryan Gosling was hot, for some reason.

Tip #9: “Think Domino’s… 30 Minutes or Less.” Or better yet, just order her some Domino’s.

Tip #10: “Pretend You’re Deathly Ill On Line.” Or just pay a visit to the food court’s Taco Bell before you shop.

Check it out, from Fox News:

When, Kelly asked, was the last time anyone has heard of NOW aligning with conservatives?

It’s rare, and when they do do it, they have some sort of caveat to go along with it, but it’s really striking that they went ahead and took Bachmann’s defense this time around. They’ve been having a lot of attacks against her and, I mean I think it’s just the final straw. She’s been, you know, in the spotlight and she’s being hit for it.

May had actually been able to speak with the head of NOW to obtain a clearer view of why the group was denouncing the Newsweek cover:

Terry O’Neill, she said what they look for is Gloria Steinem‘s test: If this were done to a man, or if it ever could have been done to a man, then it’s not considered sexist. But because, obviously, this is… She’s labeled a “queen” and put as crazy, it’s more sexist.

Kelly then very succinctly wrapped up the central issue at play in this story into a neat little phrase we’ll personally be borrowing this week:

We’ve talked before on the program about how certain women politicians — it’s not limited to conservative women, but you see that often — get deemed (and pardon the terms, folks) as either “nuts or sluts” when they’re running for office.

Have a look at the video, courtesy of Fox News:

Now, I don’t have to tell you why it’s one thing to wonder “Dag. Is she pregnant? She’s too small to know for sure. Should I offer my seat? She might get offended. What if she just had, like. A breakfast burrito just now? That’s possible. Oh man. I could really go for a breakfast burrito right now.” and quite another to create a game based on the premise that a paunch on a woman is pretty much only acceptable if she’s with child. Otherwise: Oink, amirightyouguys?

The correct answer to “pregnant or ham sandwich,” by the way, is “I ate the last person who asked that.” In the form of a breakfast burrito, naturally.

h/t FoxNews.com

Jacobus thought that everyone “making a big deal about migraines” was a “dog whistle” for the whole gender issue. Especially given that other male candidates didn’t suffer through the same scrutiny in the past despite their health issues. For instance, former Vice President Dick Cheney had various heart problems, Vice President Joe Biden had two life-threatening brain aneurysms, and since:

“We have a President who is turning 50 and he still is smoking. And if you’re President of the United States and you can’t kick the habit, you probably have a serious habit. That’s a serious health issue. If we’re going to do this, let’s look at everybody.”

Bachmann being held to a higher standard is simply because she is a woman, Jacobus argues. Yet as some have already noticed, much of the criticism of Bachmann is coming from conservatives who might be looking to attack her, not because her of her gender, but simply because they are scared she might actually win.

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

News of the apology comes from Roll Call, quoting Rep. West directly. Rep. West didn’t elaborate, and Rep. Wasserman-Schultz has yet to comment on the apology, though the apologize may come to some as a surprise after Rep. West’s spokesperson stood by the comments immediately after they went public. Rep. Wasserman-Schultz publicist did comment directly as to the original statement, however, stating that “the truth hurts” and noting that Rep. West is from a neighboring district to Wasserman-Schultz’s and should know better. The apology, of course, does not erase the email– nor whatever powers of persuasion it may have had over potential donors– but is at least a first step to mending the verbal wounds.

Update: Or not? Roll Call has updated the post to reflect the fact that, as soon as it went up, both parties began denying the report:

Wasserman Schultz aides said there had been no apology, and West’s office adamantly denied the report and demanded a retraction. [...]

West said, “I just apologized,” when asked by a Huffington Post reporter about the situation in the Speaker’s Lobby before votes Wednesday afternoon, according to a tape of the conversation.

The Huffington Post reporter repeated the question later, asking about it in the context of a group of female lawmakers preparing to hold a news conference to condemn him. The Members planned to call on the leadership of both parties to rebuke West. In response to the question, West reiterated that he had apologized before walking into the House chamber.

But West spokeswoman Angela Sachitano doubled down, saying it was Wasserman Schultz who should do the apologizing. Sachitano strenuously denied that West had apologized to Wasserman Schultz and even denied what he’d told Huffington Post.

“In fact, we’re waiting on an apology from her,” Sachitano said.

The Congresswoman also told Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room today that she did not, in fact, receive an apology:

I have not received an apology. I haven’t received a phone call. I know he has my e-mail, I haven’t got an apology on my e-mail nor on my fax machine in my district office or my congressional office in the Capitol or at the Democratic National Committee.

The video via CNN below:

Of course, MacDonald is only kidding. Google’s algorithms are merely responding to the fact that many more people search “NBA” on a regular basis and the computer only sees “WNBA” as a potential one-letter typo instead of its own thing. However, I’m gonna bet that with this clip of MacDonald as well as a Twitter campaign (#ohgoogle), someone over at Google headquarters will have rushed to fix the little error by the end of the day. What other sports-themed comedy shows can lay claim to that kind of social change, huh?

Check out the clip from Comedy Central below:

“We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity,” the authors of the study wrote.

And yet, there remains plenty of editors who rationalize the gender gap in publishing by saying that there just aren’t as many women writers. They say they don’t receive as many pitches from women. But women writers everywhere know that isn’t true – the problem is that women’s work is still too often overlooked. So for every editor who has ever said they can’t find enough women writers to publish; Ann Friedman has a new solution for them.

On Monday, Friedman started Lady Journos, a project dedicated to aggregating the work of women writers and journalists in one place to once and for all answer the question “Where are all the women writers?”  Similar to projects like Longform.org and Longreads.com, Lady Journos is a Tumblr-based site that is dedicated to curating works of long-form writing and reporting by women across a variety of topics. Friedman herself is a former editor of Alternet.org and The American Prospect, and has written about how at AlterNet she made a concerted effort to seek out women writers and publish them – and that the only way the byline gender gap could ever be rectified is if other editors also make more of an effort to publish women.

In a post on her personal blog, Friedman explains why she started Lady Journos and what she hopes to accomplish:

“Last night I made Lady Journos! — a one-stop shop for lazy editors who claim there aren’t many women journalists. Specifically, I’ll be highlighting work by women writers who are not already well-known. (Everyone loves Jane Mayer, and rightfully so! But that’s the exact reason I won’t be featuring her on the site.) As for criteria beyond the byline, it’s totally subjective. I will link to work that I think is compelling — long-form narrative pieces, investigative reporting, provocative essays — by women who deserve more exposure. I worked for four years as a features editor at a national magazine. I think I have pretty good taste.”

So far the site has approximately thirty pieces, all authored by women. Readers are also encouraged to submit recommendations to the site as well.

Check out Lady Journos on Tumblr and also on Twitter.

In the photos, taken at a Christmas party six years ago with her then-husband, Ball is wearing a black tank top and red skirt, and in some of the pictures she is leading her husband on a leash, who is wearing a Rudolph costume with a red dildo on his nose. The photos are mildly embarrassing at best, yet they have brought national media attention to the Virginia candidate and have provoked a furor over her “racy” acts.

This morning, Krystal Ball fired back in a statement accusing her critics of sexism. What happened to her, she said, is nothing unique – it could happen to any 28-year-old woman who grew up in the digital age – and they shouldn’t let their opponents use that to shame them into not running for office.

“Politics is a nasty game. I knew that coming in. I thought I could take it. But the day that I bought my first radio ads, my opponent called the station and inquired as to the size of the advertising buy. Two hours later, these photos were released by a right-wing smear blog with close ties to my opponent. I
don’t believe these pictures were posted with a desire to just embarrass me; they wanted me to feel like a whore. They wanted me to collapse in a ball of embarrassment and to hang my head in shame. After all, when you are a woman named Krystal Ball, 28 years old, running for Congress, well, you get the picture. Stripper. Porn star. I’ve heard them all. So, I sat in my husband’s arms and cried. I thought about my little girl. I couldn’t stand the idea that I had somehow damaged the cause of young women running for office. I couldn’t stand the idea that I might shame my family, my friends or my supporters in some way.

The tactic of making female politicians into whores is nothing new. In fact, it happened to Meg Whitman, one of the world’s most accomplished business women, just last week. It’s part of this whole idea that female sexuality and serious work are incompatible. But I realized that photos like the ones of me, and ones much racier, would end up coming into the public sphere when women of my generation run for office. And I knew that there could be no other answer to the question than this: Society has to accept that women of my generation have sexual lives that are going to leak into the public sphere. Sooner or later, this is a reality that has to be faced, or many young women in my generation will not be
able to run for office.

…My biggest support during this whole sad episode of my life has come from supporters of Hillary Clinton. In effect, they have been telling me that what happened to me could have happened to one of their daughters. They will not see their daughters called whores when they run for office just because of some college or post-college party. They will not watch the tide of everything they fought for washed away by the public exposure of female sexuality. Once again, like the heroes that they were a generation ago when they made their careers, they are stepping up to protect young women like me and to support us and to help us to grow up. We are young women. And we are dedicated to serving this country. And we will run for office. And we will win.”

Nearly eight months ago I wrote about Scott Brown’s campaign for US Senate in Massachusetts. More specifically, I wrote about how Brown had posed nude in a Cosmo centerfold in the 1980s – and how this seemed to have almost no negative consequence on his political career at all. In fact, some might even say it helped him: media commentators called him a “hunk” and brushed it off as a youthful mistake.

At the time, I argued that female candidates who had done similar things would never get a free pass from media scrutiny the way that Brown did. I didn’t have a perfect example to compare it to then but pointed out other examples such as the scrutiny over Michelle Obama’s arms, Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe, and Sarah Palin’s beauty pageant background.

Today, we see a female candidate for Congress who has the viability of her campaign dangerously threatened by a handful of harmless photos from a post-college gag party, in which she is completely clothed.  She’s been called racy and naughty; the photos have been referred to as “sex pics” by some blogs. They’ve been re-posted on dozens of blogs and attracted national television attention.

Scott Brown, also at age 22, the same age Krystal Ball was in her party photos, posed nude in Cosmopolitan – yet it did not bring nearly the same level of scrutiny or potential campaign damage that Ball has faced. There was no coordinated crisis communications response and TV interviews explaining the photos,  because no one perceived it as a crisis for Brown. In fact, some acknowledged that perhaps the nude photos helped his campaign and even gave him an advantage in terms of public recognition.

Why is it that the media goes haywire over a suggestive party photo of a woman candidate and her husband, but praises the male candidate who poses nude in magazines? After a supposedly epic year for women candidates in 2008, after the year of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, isn’t the playing field supposed to be even for women candidates by now?

As Ball said, “The tactic of making female politicians into whores is nothing new.” But one would hope that by 2010, that tactic would finally be extinguished.

Consider:

• “This journalist has read so few books, he listed the top 25 novels of the decade and there are no women on it.”
• “My math professor is so stupid, he hasn’t aced a girl in his class in forty years.”
• “My coworker is so stupid, when I asked him to lunch he said, ‘I guess my wife won’t mind.’”
• “This conference organizer is so stupid, he couldn’t find a woman to speak for any of the seven days of panels.”
• “The new hire is so dumb, he asked me to fetch him coffee.”
• “The CEO is such an airhead, he held the office holiday party at a strip club.”

Of course I’m being extreme here to play with this point, but while I’m already there, don’t forget: “The interior architect is such an idiot, he put glass staircases in the store.”

Yes, Apple’s glass staircases again. What many female shoppers, including myself, have long seen as an example of extremely questionable judgement. Interestingly, after writing a post mentioning it (“Skirts! Steve Jobs! Women wear skirts!”), several male friends told me, “I never thought of that.”

Now, if I were commissioning the interior of any kind of store and someone brought me blueprints including glass staircases, I’d tell him to take a hike. I wouldn’t give him a second shot. If he’s not intuitive enough to grasp that women in skirts will be uncomfortable walking upstairs, clouded glass or not, then what other errors has he made in his design?

I remember in high school we had a class on pictograms. My Vietnamese straight A classmate had what I would have considered one of the easiest to decipher: a picture of a bee and a dotted line. “What is this? I have no idea,” she said, laughing nervously. They don’t say “beeline” in Vietnamese, and it’s not a word she’d encountered learning English as a second language.

That’s the problem with cultural references. They go so far back that you would really have to live your life over to catch every one of even the most common of them.

As you can imagine, this very often happens in reverse. Plenty of women are never given a second shot because they didn’t catch a sports metaphor, didn’t understand something that a man finds blatantly obvious. And here is a fantastic post from Farrah Bostic about that.

And this is just one of the extremely complex problems women face in any kind of workforce.

There’s a reason everyone should hate sexism: it hinders progress. So long as the most qualified people are not getting the success and recognition they deserve, the world is not advancing as fast as it could.

I don’t know many people who really think “Well she can’t do x, because she’s a girl” but I can count more than enough top ten, top 25 lists of all kinds that are authored by people who can’t come up with a single female name.

Look, if you are creating, for example, a list of the top 25 tech bloggers and there’s not a single female name on there, the problem is you. You aren’t looking, you aren’t listening, something about your own cognition and repressed whatever is prevented you from identifying intellect when it comes in a female form. Because by now there are enough women in tech, media, and elsewhere that it would be statistically unlikely for one to not have several women as a colleagues.

If there is a reason I don’t always speak up every time I come across another sad example of this, it’s because I find it all so tiresome. It’s kind of like arguing with creationists all day, but creationists aren’t holding tech conferences where they invite only other creationists to speak. They don’t edit magazines where only creationists get the “big ideas” stories and all the non-creationists report on celebrity gossip. There is no prestige for them to ration out.

And worst of all, I’m tired of men who finally do enter the discussion only to offer perspectives as nuanced and thoughtful as say, “Hey, I got it! It’s not nature or nurture….it’s both!” (when not completely off the mark.)

So that’s it, everyone. If you do something sexist, I think you are as dumb as the creationists. In some cases maybe even dumber.

Related:

Where Are the Renaissance Women? [Tomorrow Museum]

Joanne McNeil blogs about technology and culture at The Tomorrow Museum, where this post was originally published. Follow her on Twitter here.

It made me sad because it framed the issue as an “us vs. them” issue, as though Jezebel’s interests were not aligned with those of the Daily Show‘s female employees. “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here,” the letter began, staking out a bright line between people who get it and people who don’t, people with a stake and people without.

There’s no question that Daily Show employees are best suited to comment on what it’s like to work there. And Jezebel’s Irin Carmon fired a big shot, calling the Daily Show ”a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed.” The open letter from Daily Show women took that one head-on. “We’re indispensable,” they wrote. “We generate a significant portion of the show’s creative content and the fact is, it wouldn’t be the show that you love without us.”

Fair, fair, and more than fair — awesome. I had no idea so many women worked at the Daily Show and as a viewer and fan it was sort of incredible to see them all arrayed across that familiar set.

But.

But it’s also incredible because it’s so unusual. Because when we’ve gotten a glimpse of the people behind the scenes in the past, emerging from the shadows to, say, claim their Emmys, that picture looks more like this:

And that’s what the letter did not address.

Where there is a heavily-lopsided ratio, there is a legitimate reason to ask why. That falls squarely on Jezebel’s beat. Even more so since the “women in the late-night comedy club” has gotten so much attention this year, since the Letterman story broke and beyond, covered widely in mainstream as well as rabidly feminist media.

So Carmon’s research and reporting was not out of left field. More than that, it was research and reporting, on a question about which she has written about widely (see here and here and here and here and here and here). Does that mean she is a greater authority on the Daily Show than the women who work there? No. But, does that then disqualify her findings? Again, no.

And that’s what made me sad about the Women of the Daily Show open letter: it seemed to freeze out the question entirely, the notion of questioning entirely.

I understand where they are coming from, why they wrote it — and more than that, that they are damned proud of making it to one of the coolest and most competitive jobs in television. And more than that, I also get that they are there because they got themselves there — they actually applied, put themselves in the ring, showed up. As Lizz Winstead and Alison Silverman have pointed out, there are very few female applicants. (Note that that’s the same reason given for the dearth of women getting VC money in the new media/tech startup scene.)

But — there are reasons for why there are so few female applicants. Is it just that women are lazy and/or unqualified (or worse, unfunny?) Come on. It is not new to acknowledge that the pathways to these positions heavily favor men.

Women are funny. Women can be hot and funny. Men can be, too! There’s no reason why they can’t be hilarious together. But still, an overwhelming most of the time, they are not. And that’s why Jezebel did everyone — women, comedy, women in comedy, and even these women in comedy — a favor by raising this issue.

Yeah, if the staff of the Colbert Report would rather talk about sandwiches in a can than your earth-shattering report, chances are it’s not really weighing too heavy on their heads. In Colbert’s defense, it is a sandwich…in a can! And the story is pretty awesome. Just check out Geekosystem’s post on it here.

Stewart responded today – calling one comment “crude, crass and sexist.”

Beyond the comment in question, the entire review was so over-the-top it would make the most obscene, unrestrained blogger blush.

The monstrosity in question, and very much in doubt, is “Need to Know,” a specious wheeze purporting, according to flatulent publicity prose, to take “an innovative approach to newsgathering and reporting” and thereby provide — on “multiple platforms,” of course — “a dynamic source of current-affairs coverage for today’s media consumers.”

This is, mind you, after episode number one.

But the real zinger was aimed at Stewart. “She looked as though she would have been much more comfortable in Clinton’s lap,” wrote Shales, as jaws dropped to the floor, no doubt. “Meacham did a slightly better job of hanging onto a teeny-tiny shred of dignity.”

Stewart responded today to TVNewser:

Since you posted Tom Shales’ crude, crass and sexist comment about me that I’d be “more at home in President Clinton’s lap”– I feel I should respond, for myself and for other hard working female journalists. Mr. Shales’ is certainly entitled to his own views about our program but in most work places it would be simply unacceptable to make this kind of public suggestive insinuation about a colleague.

Stewart is absolutely right – Shales is way over the line with this criticism. It’s ironic that one of Shales’ major critiques relates to his ardent anti-multimedia and anti-multiplatformism, while those who work in these mediums seemingly have higher professional standards than this well-known, and often-respected, TV crank. (I’m sorry – style columnist.) You can hate the show, and still treat the product with a modicum of respect. But instead, Shales takes it beyond just a bad review.

What’s more obvious is he doesn’t just hate the players, he hates the game. Need to Know has “fancily designed Web-page graphics,” and “‘empowers audiences to ‘tune in’ any time and any where.’” This is terrible in Shales mind, and signals the demise of the television viewing he had grown accustomed to, and comfortable with. So he takes out his anger (actual line: “I felt embittered — angry”) on the show’s hosts, with cheap shots – especially at Stewart.

It’s a new media, Tom. Grow up.

And watch the first episode here. See if you have feel the need to spew the same bile as Shales over the supposed “monstrosity.”

> Update: Check out Shales long history of similarly sexist comments on Jezebel.

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I have yet to find any. But had a woman candidate done the same, it would have cost her the election. No female politician could hope to make it out of a scandal like that.

Michelle Obama faces daily scrutiny from the media on every one of her wardrobe choices. It’s a national controversy every time she bares her arms – imagine if she’d posed even more bare! (I can practically hear Rush Limbaugh‘s tirade already).

Sarah Palin’s background in beauty pageants was constantly mocked during the 2008 campaign, and remains another shot to be aimed at her, another reason why she is taken less seriously as a candidate. “Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land,” wrote David Carr in the New York Times in 2008.

She was derided as a dumb beauty queen, but he’s praised as a “hunk.”

Monday night on Fox, the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said that Brown is a “hunk“ and the fact that he posed “semi-nude” actually “gave him a huge advantage in terms of the public recognition” and that “It made him a recognizable public figure, which he was not before. A lot of women think he’s really cute.”

Gawker has been using Brown’s centerfold image since September. Wonkette dug up the photo in 2007 and it has been circulating in the media ever since. And yet, this man has just been elected to the United States Senate – the fact that he took his clothes off for a magazine didn’t hurt his race one bit, and the media is at fault for brushing it off because he’s a man.

It’s a sharp contrast from how the public – and the media – would have reacted had a woman candidate been in the same situation. One can only imagine how harshly a woman would be judged in the outpouring of blog posts and media coverage after a woman politician’s nude photos were discovered: She’s promiscuous! She’s a slut! She must be hiding other skeletons in her closet! And probably most importantly: the media and blogosphere would no doubt question her very qualifications and fitness for public office.

“Would Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin even be on their town councils if they had posed nude for a men’s magazine? Of course not- the media frenzy would have sunk them, but the press is collectively giggling over Scott Brown’s centerfold,” said Patricia Murphy, Capitol Hill Bureau Chief of Politics Daily.

“But maybe Scott Brown’s success will open the door for Stormy Daniels to be taken more seriously? If it doesn’t disqualify him, it shouldn’t disqualify anyone,” she added.

Remember when Hillary Clinton showed the tiniest bit of cleavage and the media let loose? Even the Washington Post wrote a lengthy essay debating the meaning of the cleavage and what it said about Hillary’s image – and all she did was wear a low-cut top. And Clinton’s pantsuits were the butt of countless jokes on the 2008 campaign trail — the Washington Post said she was “dressed like a solar flare.”

“Google “Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits” and the thousands of pages that come up are an amalgamation of gentle mockery, a modicum of flattery and all-out derision,” the LA Times declared in September 2008.

It’s appalling that the media hasn’t shown more outrage over the now Senator-elect Scott Brown’s actions, where we most certainly know they would do so had it been a woman. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised – this kind of sexism has long been rampant in our media system. Sarah Palin’s background in beauty pageants is routinely mocked. And yet, these women faced severe criticism for these choices despite the fact that none did anything as drastic as posing nude in a national women’s magazine.

Where a woman’s very morals and character would be questioned in this situation, Scott Brown is getting a free pass from the media, and the voters that just elected him. He’s a “hunk,” his behavior was charmingly “footloose and carefree.” And meanwhile WaPo’s Quinn lavishes Brown with praise, claiming that posing in Cosmo gave him a huge advantage — you know, because Brown is a “hunk.”

Thanks for standing up for women candidates, Washington Post and the rest of the media. Thanks for nothing.

Beck responded to the potential ticket on the radio Wednesday: he doesn’t think anything is a “hoot,” the ticket would have to be Beck-Palin, and she’d probably just be “yapping” instead of staying “in the kitchen.” You know, kidding, of course.

During the interview, which Beck played twice as he set up his own take, Palin told Gretchen Carlson: “I got a kick out of it, and he probably thought that was just a hoot too. I don’t know. We’ll see, we’ll see.” During an earlier interview with Newsmax, Palin said she thought Beck was a hoot as she also didn’t rule out the possibility of a joint run.

“I don’t think things are hoots,” said Beck. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she stops using the word ‘hoot.’”

Laughter from the studio ensues. Then to the real issue – what about a run? Beck ruled it out, then had this exchange:

Beck: Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck…Can you imagine, can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? What? Come on – she’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.’

Co-host: You’d you have to live up to evil conservative stereotypes, you’d have no choice but to do so.

Beck: I’d have to. Look I talked to the woman about it, I don’t even know what she was saying.

He’s kidding of course – Glenn Beck touts the merits of Sarah Palin on a regular basis on his Fox News program. But just like we identified the difference between Radio Lou Dobbs and TV Lou Dobbs, there’s a difference between Radio Glenn Beck and TV Glenn Beck. From his Zoo Crew roots, Beck’s career on radio runs deeper than his TV career, and involves a lot less serious political discussion. Instead, his radio show is looser, and he feels more free to press the limits of humor. Even Beck’s interview with NY-23 conservative candidate Doug Hoffman, when he called Beck his mentor, was a far different tone than when he discussed the race on TV.

Still, the whole ‘women belong in the kitchen’ line when discussing Palin, even as a joke about what others think as his co-host indicated, gets dangerously close to crossing the line of sexism. Maybe TV Beck needs to have a talk with Radio Beck.

(via ThinkProgress – h/t Gawker):

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» Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

Related:
Rachel Sklar: Watchdog of the Underrated Woman [GELF]
Glynnis MacNicol: Miss En Abyme [GELF]
Jessica Grose: Peggy Olson’s Heiress [GELF]
Anna Holmes: Leader of the Jezzies [GELF]
Caroline McCarthy: Working The Social Media Beat [GELF]
Panel Nerds: Women of the Media World Unite and Take Over [Mediaite]

>>>NEXT: Transcript of the panel.

Barack Obama’s fondness for golf is not a secret — anyone who follows a White House correspondent on Twitter knows that their weekends are often spent waiting for the president to finish his 18 holes. This past weekend, however, Obama’s favorite pastime got some extra, significantly placed, mentions. The first from CBS’s Mark Knoller who noted that Obama has racked as many golf games in his first nine months than George W. Bush did in almost three years:

Today – Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.

Bush ended his presidential golf after round 24. He came to feel it was inappropriate for the Commander-in-Chief while US was at war.about 17 hours ago from web

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” Bush said to Politico’s Mike Allen.about 17 hours ago from web

Perhaps presidential golf is the new presidential “clearing brush.” Stay tuned for Glenn Beck’s analysis of why all this golf makes Obama a communist/socialist/elitist Mao follower. Which might be humorous, except the politics of Obama’s golf game does not stop there. Yesterday’s pool report, penned by Chicago Sun-Times‘ Lynn Sweet, noted that Saturday was the first time that Obama had invited a woman to join his foursome. The first time. From the report:

The golf game was notable in that the presidential foursome included, for the first time a female, Melody Barnes, the president’s chief domestic policy advisor. The foursome: Obama, Barnes, Obama pal Eric Whitaker, the physician who is an executive vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Marvin Nicholson, the White House trip director.

The timing of Barnes’ appearance on the green (also noted in WaPo) was interesting as it coincided with this Sunday’s NYT A-1 story about how the Obama White House is a boys club.

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players…Ben Finkenbinder, a junior press aide and scratch golfer, was recently invited into a foursome with Mr. Obama. (In records kept by Mark Knoller of CBS, the president has played 23 rounds of golf since taking office, none of which have included women, though Mr. Knoller allows that the press office does not always release the names of every player. A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Friday that Mr. Obama planned to play this weekend with Ms. Barnes.)

That is a whole lot of high profile, politicized golf mentions for one weekend! The last time this much attention was spent on Presidential leisure time was during the Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard vacation, which also happens to be the week many people feel the White House lost control of the narrative. So, yeah. Get ready, because there is only so much White House vs. Fox News a news cycle can take and ‘the President plays too much sexist golf’ seems set to nicely fill in the gaps in the week to come.

Then I saw the headline. It read: WOMAN ON TOP.

Here’s the full spread below:

Is it me? Am I crazy? Or is that title just unmistakably a double-entendre? Which takes this accomplished woman at the pinnacle of a highly-decorated career — and reminds us all that she’s also good for sex? I am scratching my head trying to remember all those “Charlie Gibson: Cock of the Walk” articles from 2006. It is, of course, not hard to find a feminized Katie Couric headline. (Remember “Katie Cougar?”) But aren’t we supposed to be past this?

Maybe it’s me, and I’m just looking for this stuff. What does Google say? Hmm, “Woman on Top” gets results that largely implicates helpful advice for you and your partner or the 2000 Penelope Cruz movie of the same name. She was also a successful woman, but she had an issue. Guess what it was?

Then I asked my mom, thinking that maybe it was a generational thing. I told her about the story and then read her the headline. “Oh,” she said. “That’s sexual.” Then I switched the subject immediately, but not before she said “What a shame, she’s such an accomplished woman.”

Yes it is a shame — we knew the feminized Diane Sawyer headlines were coming, just not so soon. This is the first magazine feature out the gate, and it’s a good one — Hamptons editor Cristina Greeven Cuomo asked good questions, and got great answers (and clues to her upcoming ABC World News staff about what she’ll expect: When asked how makes mediocre material better, she says “It’s in the writing. You have to fuse it with what you’re thinking.” So, staffers, better learn how Diane Sawyer thinks!). Old-school journos will love her nods to the greats: Don Hewitt, and Roone Arledge, and her characterization of this crazy new media world as “nonstop yakking — all of us, all of the time.”

And yes, it’s a great headline — sure to get attention! — but was it really necessary? Especially paired with that photo, featuring Sawyer with a knowing look, clad fashionably, appropriately yet undeniably appealingly in heels and a black leather skirt. Oh dear Lord, how am I talking about what Diane Sawyer is wearing so soon?

There are people out there who will say that this isn’t a big deal, but I think it is. There’s nothing wrong with noting that Sawyer is gorgeous — She is! Word from sources at Cap File is she needed next to no retouching — but it takes it a step further to present her with such a blatantly sexual association like this. I was trying to think of other women for whom “Woman on Top” would be seen as appropriate, and I was stuck: Madeleine Albright? Jill Abramson? Oprah? Michelle Obama? Good Lord, even imagining that last headline makes me uncomfortable.

I wonder if this would bother Sawyer, or if she’s used to this. She was asked by Cuomo how it felt to interview people like Ahmadinejad, with archaic views of women. Said Sawyer:

I’m fairly used to being dismissed, particularly in certain parts of the world and it was even truer a few decades ago when I was starting out.

So maybe this is no big deal to her, considering what she went through then. Conversely, maybe it’s no big deal now — not only was the interviewer a prominent, accomplished woman, but the editor of Capitol File is, too — EIC Sarah Shaffer, pictured here with Hillary Clinton — someone else who knows her way around a sexist/suggestive headline.

Sigh. Will this ever get easier? Maybe when Ann Curry knocks out BriWi at NBC Nightly News. She’s hot, too.

Related:
Charlie Gibson To Leave ABC World News; Diane Sawyer, Woman, To Replace Him [Mediaite]
Diane Sawyer Vs. Katie Couric: Handicapping The Coming “Catfight” [Jezebel]
Advice For Diane Sawyer [CJR]